Friday, March 1, 2013

Master Grade Tallgeese EW Review

So yesterday my Tallgeese from the Reddit Group Buy from ModelGrade showed up at my door. I immediately unboxed and got to work on it.

Hit the jump for the runners, some construction, and the review!

Plates:

A plate molded mostly in yellow, with some red and clear parts. there's a piece on here for every piece of the Tallgeese individually. shoulders, arms, legs, head, etc. each have a yellow accent on it. as well as the helmet mohawk, and the clear parts for the face and gun cameras

B1 and B2 consist mostly of white armor parts for the legs and some parts for the wrist and elbows, as well as some of the skirt armor pieces.

C1 and C2 are mostly frame bits for the arms, legs and feet. also containing the internal structure for the hips and some inner shoulder pieces and thrusters, as well as the grey parts for the shield.

D is your dark blue plate for your hands, shoulder exteriors, feet, and the connectors for the dauber gun and shield. and your E plate is molded in grey, and contains more various inner frame components and some backings to your skirt armor and some waist connectors.

F is a small medium grey plate containing accents for the ankle armor, the dauber gun, and the chest. and a pretty standard polycap runner.

H1 (getting a little out of order here) is molded in a white, and contains the hip/leg skirts, the chest, and the outer armor for the shoulder, as well as bits for the face, and verniers, and your two molded figures of Zechs, the pilot of the Tallgeese

I1 and I2 are parts for your backpack verniers and dauber gun respectively, with a few parts on I2 for your skirt armor.

G1 is molded in a very light grey and has parts for the verniers, the torso, skirts, and some other bits to give some color seperation on the kit.

I'd say for your moneys worth you get a pretty decent amount of plastic, and despite being a mostly white mobile suit, you get a fair amount of greys and yellows as well.

Construction:

The torso probably had some of the most parts for construction besides the arms and legs. you start by assembling the cockpit area and the cockpit hatch before assembling the mounts for the large verniers and adding some accents, then the final outer armor.

Head construction is pretty straightforward, put the casing to the head around a polycap, add clear pieces and accents, then outer armor, then the mohawk.

The arm is constructed in three parts, then combined. starting with the forearm, the upper arm, then the shoulder/shoulder armor, and finally combined with the addition of the hand.

The leg is constructed foot first, then the knee joint, followed by the rest of the leg

The hips are constructed with frame pieces first, then connectors then outer armor and skirts.

Finally are your side/leg skirt armors which are very simple in construction, and peg into the leg and the hip.

(unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of the verniers or the weapons/accessories during construction due to my desk arrangement at the time)

After completing the construction of the kit you'll have a fully standing tallgeese molded (mostly) in proper colors. the kit itself has a fantastic amount of detail carved into it. the color seperation really helps the kit stand out.

Review:

Even without panel lines or paint, I think this kit does a good job of looking fantastic. One thing that I noticed about it was that the suit itself stands a little shorter than your standard MG, and the hands are quite small as well. But don't let that discourage you, This kit is definitely worth the build I think.

The backpack verniers have a gimmick where if you hold the top and bottoms of the pods, and pull, they open to reveal internal detail and thrusters.

POW! Fully open, additionally the fins on the sides of each pod can be moved out to give a more 'full open' look to the pod, and also moves the little thruster inside. the back skirts can be opened as well, revealing more thrusters hidden in this suit.

Articulation in the arms is pretty good at the elbows, but don't expect a ton of movement out of the shoulders and upper arms, as the thruster pods tend to get in the way when moving the arms, but the arms do get a full 360 degree rotation. as well as 360 degrees beneath the shoulder, and almost a full 180 at the elbow, the wrist is on a ball joint, and the fingers are fixed pose (i'll get to those later)

the legs move about 90 degrees forward, and just over 45 out to each side. the knees bend almost an impressive 180 degrees, and just like the elbows, feature some great looking armor splits (I'm a huge fan of armor splits) the ankles are on double ball joints allowing a great range of side-to-side movement and rotation, and almost infinite leg posability. the waist is on a double ball joint, and can be weighed down by the pods on the back of the kit. but only gets awkward when doing standing poses. sometimes they can cause the waist to lean backward on it's own. so I recommend putting some glue or paint on the joints to these parts before assembly to tighten them up some.

The hands included in the kit are fix pose hands with interchangable fingers, and a ball-jointed thumb. the fingers included are as follows:

Open finger/expressive. These are my favorite for idle poses, as I feel when a machine isn't being piloted there's no tension in any of the parts, so the hands would rest partially open similar to how a human hand works. although I could see how some might argue when a machine is off it would simply lock in place and the parts would simply remain as they were just before it was turned off.

Closed fist: these are pretty self explanatory. closed fist fingers, when the thumb is positioned across them will look like a clenched fist, or look like the suit is throwing a punch.

Open grip: these are the hands you'd use when the tallgeese is wielding beam sabers, or holding the handle on his shield. simply take the fingers off, and peg them into what is being held, then attach them to the backplate and carry on.

Trigger finger: finally is the finger set for the use with the dauber gun. this works exactly like the open grip fingers, except this has a split trigger finger so it looks like the hand is naturally resting on the trigger of the dauber gun.

Accessories:

The weapons included with the Tallgeese are the Dauber gun, and two beam sabers mounted to the back of the shield, the other accessory being the shield. The dauber gun, and shield are all molded in multiple colors and look fantastic hanging off of the Tallgeese. The Tallgeese can either connect these pieces to the shoulder armor via a little arm joint you can plug in to the gun and shoulder, Or you can peg them in to the hands, and hold them freely. This is where my biggest issue with the kit comes into play. When the gun and shield are pegged into the shoulders of the Tallgeese, you can also attach them to the arms, but this SEVERELY restricts your mobility. your arm will only move at the shoulder at that point, so don't expect as much freedom when posing the kit if you're going to peg your shield or dauber gun into the hands, while pegged into the shoulder.

this wouldn't be too bad if the gun didn't go into the hand at such an odd angle:

It almost points upward, it doesnt look awful, but slightly awkward, and again, part of this issue is weighed by the fact that the kit is standing. I'd hardly call it a con to the kit, because most kits look better in the air than on the ground. So I hardly think it's fair to fault it for that.

when standing the gun looks cool hanging off to the side of the suit and adds to the bulk of the suit.

I'm not the most imaginative with posing, but here's the coolest pose I could come up with, having the suit standing on the ground. Not terribly threatening or expressive. But for standing, I like it. I do recommend buying an action base if you plan on picking this guy up. (I'll try to post some pictures of him flying around sometime)

Conclusion:

In short, I think this kit is a great build for anybody who liked the Tallgeese in the Gundam Wing anime. It's molded in nice colors, and has just the right amount of grey to break the white up. It's a really fun build, and I'm glad I didn't resist the urge to dig right into this guy. The accessories and hand parts included in the kit, as well as the gimmicks included are all really fun to build and neat to execute. there's movable armor in some very cool places, and all the thrusters, who would say no to buying this guy?Pros:-Beautiful molding-Fun build
-Great color seperation
-Good posability
-Good accessories

Cons:-Backpack can cause some weight issues-Legs can't move backward, pods can interfere with arm posability
-Weapon pegs when combined with the arms can limit posability in arms
-Ankle armor likes to pop off when posing legs

That's it for this review. thanks for reading! I'll see you guys next time ;D